Elif Shafak Collection 4 Books Set - Fiction - Paperback

Titles in this Set:

1. The Architect's Apprentice
2. The Forty Rules of Love
3. The Bastard of Istanbul
4. The Island of Missing Trees

Description:

The Architect's Apprentice
Sixteenth-century Istanbul: a stowaway arrives in the city bearing an extraordinary gift for the Sultan. The boy is utterly alone in a foreign land, with no possessions, except Chota, a rare white elephant destined for the palace menagerie.

So begins an epic adventure that will see young Jahan rise from lowly origins to the highest ranks of the Sultan's court. Along the way, he will meet deceitful courtiers and false friends, gypsies, animal tamers and the beautiful, mischievous Princess Mihrimah. He will journey with Chota to the furthest corners of the kingdom and back again. And one day, he will catch the eye of the royal architect, Sinan, a chance encounter destined to change Jahan's fortunes for ever.

The Architect's Apprentice is a magical, sweeping tale of one boy and his elephant, caught up in a world of wonder and danger.

The Forty Rules of Love
Ella Rubinstein has a husband, three teenage children and a pleasant home. Everything that should make her confident and fulfilled. Yet there is an emptiness at the heart of her life - an emptiness once filled by love.

So when Ella reads a manuscript about the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi and his mentor Shams of Tabriz, and his forty rules of life and love, she is ready to look at her life anew. Compelled to embrace change, she embarks on a journey to meet the mysterious author. It is a quest infused with Sufi mysticism and verse, taking Ella and us into a faraway world where faith and doubt are heartbreakingly explored. The Forty Rules of Love is a mesmerizing tale of discovery, language, truth and, of course, love itself.

The Bastard of Istanbul
One rainy afternoon in Istanbul a woman walks into a doctor's surgery. ‘I want an abortion,' she announces. She is nineteen years old and unmarried. What happens that day will change her life, and the lives of everyone around her.

Twenty years later, Asya Kazanci lives with her extended family in Istanbul. A mysterious curse causes all the men to die by the age of forty-one, so it is a house of women, among them her beautiful, rebellious mother, Zeliha, clairvoyant Auntie Banu and bar-brawl widow, Auntie Cevriye. But when Asya's Armenian-American cousin Armanoush comes to stay, long-hidden family secrets connected with Turkey's turbulent past begin to emerge.

The Island of Missing Trees
Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. The taverna It is 1974 on the island of Cyprus. Two teenagers, from opposite sides of a divided land, meet at a tavern in the city they both call home. The tavern is the only place that Kostas, who is Greek and Christian, and Defne, who is Turkish and Muslim, can meet, in secret, hidden beneath the blackened beams from which hang garlands of garlic, chilli peppers and wild herbs. This is where one can find the best food in town, the best music, the best wine. But there is something else to the place: it makes one forget, even if for just a few hours, the world outside and its immoderate sorrows.

In the centre of the tavern, growing through a cavity in the roof, is a fig tree. This tree will witness their hushed, happy meetings, their silent, surreptitious departures; and the tree will be there when the war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to rubble, when the teenagers vanish and break apart.